OXFORD HAZARD MANAGEMENT provides consultancy services in safety and environmental risk management for major hazard installations in the energy sector.
Our mission:
to help our clients harness potentially hazardous sources of energy so as to ensure people benefit from the energy without being harmed by its hazards;
to uphold the highest standards of technical and relational excellence in our services, and 
to promote those standards via our publications.

We work primarily in the upstream oil and gas industry and the civil nuclear industry. See the PROJECT EXPERIENCE and SERVICES pages for more details.

Twenty-five years’ experience in safety, risk and reliability assessment and management in the oil and gas and nuclear industries
Active in risk management education and technology transfer via the Institute of Risk Management

OXFORD HAZARD MANAGEMENT specialises in undertaking and interpreting risk analysis in a tailored manner in order to answer the client’s specific information needs.
Risk analysis may be undertaken with a variety of different objectives, such as those listed in NORSOK Z-013. Typically, it is used to provide information to a broader risk management process, including in particular:
Identifying measures needed to reduce risks as low as reasonably practicable (ALARP);
Demonstrating that risks are (or will be) ALARP.
The analysis is unlikely to achieve its objectives unless it is deliberately designed to do so. A typical “handle turning” QRA will provide some of the required information if it is properly interpreted, but in some cases a bespoke analysis is essential. OXFORD HAZARD MANAGEMENT has developed or is developing a number of special QRA features that provide information on the effectiveness of risk reduction measures, such as investigation of:
dominant hazard sequences and the effectiveness of preventive measures specifically for them;
emergency response effectiveness based on the development of hazard events over time.
In addition, OXFORD HAZARD MANAGEMENT is conversant not only with techniques for ALARP demonstration, but also with the philosophical and ethical basis of ALARP, and is able to consider complex cases involving other values such as environment
or community, which are therefore not adequately covered by the traditional cost v safety equation alone.

The OXFORD HAZARD MANAGEMENT ox symbol has obvious links with Oxford. But what does it have to do with energy hazard management? To most people in Britain today, the answer is “nothing”. But if you had asked the question before the Industrial Revolution, or asked it today in the parts of the world that are not industrialised, it would have been obvious. For tasks that required more power than human muscles can provide, an ox (or a team of oxen) was often the preferred energy source. But an ox is also a hazard. If it is allowed out of control, property might be destroyed and people injured or killed. So it should be no surprise, for example, that some of the principles underpinning hazard management as it is practised in the energy industries today can be clearly seen (applied to oxen) in legal codes that date from the early Iron Age.

Energy and hazard have always been found together, and always will. They are opposite sides of the same coin. Hazard is energy out of control: the power, not to serve, but to harm. Identifying the major energy constituents of a system is the starting point for hazard identification techniques commonly used in the major hazard industries. OXFORD HAZARD MANAGEMENT has used its expertise in these techniques to develop an analogous approach to risk identification in other industries, based on parameters that play a similar role to energy in physical systems.